StillSecure, After All These Years

Like US Presidents, when a CEO leaves their legacy is important

One of the things you always hear about lame duck US Presidents is they are always very concerned with their legacy.  How will history treat them.  Will Bill Clinton be best remembered for the economic prosperity we enjoyed under his administration or will it be about what he did with some White House intern?  In the case of George W Bush, did he keep America safe after the terror attacks of 9/11 or did he involve us in an unnecessary and costly war, ruin the economy, etc, etc.  I don't care what side of these you are on, the important thing is when a leader leaves, how he is remembered and what his legacy is critical.

Yesterday we heard about two high profile tech leaders leaving.  Over at Symantec, John Thompson will retire at the end of this fiscal year.  At Yahoo, Jerry Yang one of the co-founders at Yahoo stepped down.  How will history treat these two?  Is it fair?  I think probably not.

Lets first examine Yang.  An icon of the Internet era, he gave life to one of the original Internet powerhouses. It seemed that Yahoo was going to be one of the four horsemen of the Internet going forward.  Starting with search, they moved well beyond mere search.  The company spawned countless dot com millionaires and made billionaires of Yang and his fellow co-founder.  If Yang would have stayed out of it when he first left Yahoo, his legacy would be secure as an Internet legend. But he came back to help Yahoo compete in the Web 2.0 Internet.  An Internet where Google is the undisputed king of search and Yahoo had to learn to monetize other areas of the business. But Yang I think is destined to be best remembered as the arrogant techie who refused to come under Microsoft's thumb and turned down a 10's of billions of dollars offer.  While he was offered 33 dollars a share, his stock today is under 11 dollars.  To add salt to the wound, after cozying up to arch enemy Google to thwart Microsoft, Google tossed him aside like yesterdays news.  I am afraid history will not look kindly on Yangs legacy. In fact the future of Yahoo itself is no longer StillSecure (hey I couldn't resist the plug).

Thompson on the other hand I think will be treated much more kindly by the historians.  John was not a founder at Symantec.  But ten years ago he took over a consumer computer security and utility company and turned it into one of the biggest software companies in the world.  Though there are many who point to a lack of innovation and execution, as well as integration at Symantec, the fact is that under John Thompson, Symantec is a giant.  They are big Yellow.  They have moved beyond security into storage and network management.  They have added to the consumer segment both enterprise and mid-market.  Symantec is in fact ubiquitous.  I think that is the legacy that John Thompson will be remembered for favorably by history.

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Is Sun's open source strategy its savior or destroyer?

I was reading Steven J Vaughn-Nichols column the other day entitled, "Sun: Dead company walking". Vaughn-Nichols laments that Sun is probably doomed and too bad, just when it realized that it is truly an open source company and given the chance could be so successful, but it is probably too late. Of course realize that Vaughn-Nichols is an open source bigot who thinks open source is the answer to all things and that Microsoft is the anti-Christ incarnate. 

All of the doom and gloom surrounding the recent bad news at Sun got me to thinking. When I was early in my tech career a Sun server running the latest version of Solaris was the baddest game in town.  Yes, if you were doing media maybe a Silcon Graphics box was hotter but Sun owned the data center.  Utlra Sparc's were our web server of choice in those days. The web was owned by Sun gear. Even though LInux was there, it was not as secure, stable or as scalable as Solaris.  Sun seemed to have the world on a string and was even able to tweak Bill Gates nose.  So where did it go wrong? 

Some like Vaughn-Nichols will say Sun was too late in adopting open source like LInux and such. I say the opposite, I think Sun went wrong trying to be too much and too open to too many people. I think trying to make Solaris work on Intel as well as it did on Sun CPUs was a mistake.  I think making Linux work on SPARC as well as Solaris was a mistake.  Yes the platform was proprietary, but it rocked.  Rolls Royce engines don't run in Chevys and Ford parts don't fit onto a Bentley. 

When Sun tried to appeal to the every man, instead of being the Geeks hot rod, things started to unravel.  I think their business at the high end was a sustainable model.  No they were not going to over take Microsoft, but they would not be in the place they are today either.

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Is search about to experience a "riot"

Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves - do any of these ring a bell?  The back alleys of Silicon Valley are littered with the corpses of search engines that couldn't. Google has beaten most of these names into the annals of history.  Only Yahoo and Microsoft (with their deep pockets) still put up some token resistance to the Borg-Google collective. Why? Do we like the Google color schemes?  Do the double "0s" get us.  Do we like the idea of advertiser based searching?  No, No and no.  We use Google because more than any other search engine out there, when we want to find something, Google finds it for us.  The algorithms and intelligence Google uses results in what we are looking for.  Forget Android, Google Apps, Google Maps and all of that other stuff, we use Google because their search renders the most relevant results.

Could there by a new player on the horizon that that gives us more relevant results?  Could there be a "riot" in the search arena?  If you believe what the folks at OneRiot say, there very well could be. In an age of social networking, this is a social search engine.  OneRiot gives you search results not based upon how many links are there to that page.  The results you get are based upon the popularity of those pages as measured by people on the net.  This should result in links not to the wikipedia page, but to pages that real people look at when looking for a particular keyword.  This could be the key to breaking out of the collective. To paraphrase what Jon Landau once said about Bruce Springsteen, I have seen the future of Internet search and its name is OneRiot.

Besides the search OneRiot plays on its social media roots and has some really great add ons.  There are plug ins for my space (why no facebook guys?), twitter, web slices for IE8, etc.  Check them out.  Also you can make their searches better by installing their pulse checker.

OneRiot is based in Boulder, Co and in full disclosure I have some friends who work there.  But don't let that hold you back.  Go check out OneRiot and see for yourself that there can be more to search than being another drone of the collective.

Are download limits the fly in the ointment of a broadband future?

In just a few short years the move from dial up to broadband in our homes is complete.  Do any of you know anyone who still uses dial up for Internet access anymore? The US is actually behind much of the rest of the world in broadband access as well.  Many other countries have cheaper, faster access than we do. 

All of this fast access has also transformed what we access.  Can you imagine what YouTube would be like on dial up?  Could NetFlix deliver video via the web?  Could any video, graphic or other big file in the cloud type of application work without broadband?

All of these great applications are built on a platform of ubiquitous and cheap bandwidth.  Much like our whole economy was built on cheap, ubiquitous energy.  The broadband revolution was built on getting the fattest pipe possible into the house.  The idea was with a fat pipe, the applications to fill those pipes would follow, and follow they did.

Now the ISPs are rethinking this position.  ATT is the latest to join the group who want to charge based upon how much you download and upload to your computers. So now paying for a fat pipe is not enough. If you are going to use that fat pipe you are going to pay for how much you put in there. Some say that this is only fair. If you use more than the next person you should pay for that extra use. I say no.  I think this is a change in the rules tin mid-stream. We have an ecosystem built upon one model of broadband and now we are being slipped another.

What effect will this have on YouTube, NetFlix, cloud computing, etc.?  I don't know, but this could be the fly in the ointment of our broadband future.

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Terrorist Twits?

Image via CrunchBase

Read an interesting article in Yahoo tech today about a US Army report on the potential use of Twitter by terrorists and other subversive groups. After initially rolling my eyes about the government going a little to far, I began to see who Twitter could be used by terrorists and the like.  Twitters ability to provide "live" coverage of an event is something that some of us in the security industry have used at infosec shows.  The example cited by the article about activists at the Republican National Convention using twitter to report on police movements and positions is compelling. You can see how twitter could be used for that type of thing.

But than I think the report goes to far:

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.

Hacktivists refers to politically motivated computer hackers.

"Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives," the report said

If all they are doing is disseminating their ideas, I think it is protected under freedom of speech. It would be good to see a court hold that "tweeting your mind" is a protected form of communication and expression.

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Whats up with Google Alerts?

Image via CrunchBase

Something is up with Google Alerts.  I have alerts set up for a lot of key words around security technologies and companies.  This weekend I started receiving a whole bunch of alerts based upon news stories that were in some cases 2 years or more old. Does anyone know any reason for this?

You can't just tell the board anything you want

Came across an almost unbelievable story tonight. The title of the story was that 40 people were laid off at a software company. I figured it was going to be about the economy, but no.  This one is crazy.  Seems the CEO and CFO of Entellium decided that they were were going to tell the board that their revenue was 400k a month higher than it really was! Over time the revenue of the company was stated to be over 15 million, when it was just over 3 million. I know there are used car salesman type of companies that might overstate revenue to a reporter or analyst, but it takes some set of stones to lie to the board about it. 

Now Entellium is not a public company, so there was not public stockholder fraud.  The fraud came into play when the investors including the well known Ignition Partners, claimed they would not have invested in the company had they known the real revenue numbers. It was based upon this claim that the charges were bought.

But I ask myself, what kind of venture company would invest money and keep investing more money (they raised about 50m total), without some sort of audit of the books?  We have yearly audits here at StillSecure.  I can't imagine with raising that kind of money, no one asked for an audit.  It just seems incredulous.

I think before the dust settles on this one, we may find out that there was more here than meets the eye. I would not be surprised if someone was not turning a blind eye towards the revenue reports to facilitate an exit or something else.  If that is the case, these two guys may be just the tip of the iceberg here! In the meantime, 40 more people are out of a job.

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Delta steps into big brother role, do they belong there?

 

Image via Wikipedia

I for one was pleased to hear about Delta Airlines plans to start offering wi-fi access on domestic flights.  I figured being a platinum medallion member there is a good chance I may even get access for free. I frankly was worried about security while logged on in the air. In a "closed" environment on the plane a malicious individual could play havoc with folks whose security settings may not be up to snuff.  But what makes logging in on the plane any different than logging on at the airport?

Now comes reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a follow up in ComputerWorld by Mike Elgan, that Delta will implement some sort of content filtering application to make sure that inappropriate web sites are not accessed while on the plane.  This raises several issues in my mind.  First of all what makes Delta the judge of what is appropriate or not.  Second isn't it a bit imbecilic that they may prevent access to pornographic web sites, but have no problem with people running a porno DVD on their computer.  If keeping smut off the plane is the goal, what difference does it make if it is via the web or on a DVD? Lastly, what happens when inevitably the filtering solution blocks a legitimate web site?  If I paid for that access and was unable to access what I wanted and it was a legitimate site, is Delta going to refund my fees?

It seems to me that when Delta steps into the role of big brother and is going to regulate what I am allowed to see, I am having to conform to their views on what is normal.  If I am paying my own hard earned cash, as long as it is legal, Delta should not have the right to filter me. I want to make my own decisions.  I also think that this is a case where the market will take care of itself.  Peer pressure will stop people from viewing smut on the plane better than Delta's big brother censors.

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Bear Stearns, Lehman . . . Ebay?

Reading Richi Jennings blog today it looks like Wall Street giants aren't the only ones in trouble.  Richi links to two articles, one in Barrons that details increasing problems and pressures at the Internet giant. Of course Ebay, along with Amazon, Yahoo and Google were four of the pillars that the whole Internet commercial sector was built on.  According to the article, their acquisitions of PayPal and Skype have seriously hurt the core business.

The rumors are that up to 1500 people could be laid off, including some execs.  Hard to believe how far the mighty have fallen.  If this can happen to ebay, what about the rest of the tech darlings?  With the Dow losing almost 500 points today, no one will be immune from the bloodbath, not even Internet sacred cows.

Apple is a black box company

The iPhone is my first experience being an Apple customer.  After a few months now, I have one thing to say to Steve Jobs and Co - Set my people free!  They talk about Microsoft locking you in?  Apple  makes Microsoft look like libertarians.

A few days ago I wrote about a frustrating experience I had flying across the country. I had a file attachment in an email on my iPhone.  It was a Power Point file. I wanted to edit it before I had to present in the morning.  There was just no way to get it off my phone on the computer, without mailing it to myself, which I could not do on the plane.  It was frustrating for me because for the last two years I had Windows mobile phones.  When you plugged in the USB, the phone became a mounted drive and you could drag and drop files back and forth between the phone and your computer.  Not with the iPhone it seems.  Even though when you plug it in and it syncs with iTunes, is not any different, Apple does not want you to be able to move your own files on and off the phone.

I received a note from a reader telling me that a new app was available called Air Sharing that would let you do this.  I downloaded the app and tried it out.  First of all you still can't just plug in the USB and move files.  It works by setting up a web server on your iPhone that can only be accessed via a wireless network connection.  So for the plane scenario that started this, it was basically useless.

I had music on my iPhone that was there from my old computer. It was my own MP3 files, not bought from iTunes and no DMR issues. I have been trying to get them on my new computer from the iPhone.  But again because of Apple's totalitarian philosophy, if you want to sync your iPhone with iTunes it will wipe out your iPhone music and replace it with what you have in your iTunes library.  Again, it is the Apple way or no way.  Well it turns out that Air Sharing is the same garbage. You can move files from your computer to the iPhone but not the other way.  What good is that?  I could just attach and mail them to myself and do the same thing.  I don't blame the developers of Air Sharing, their hands are tied by Apple.

In spite of this uselessness, the Apple fan boy crowd can't stop crowing about the legendary Apple user experience that this App allows and how great it is.  Here is a news flash for you:  You want to see how it should really work, go check out a Windows mobile phone! In the meantime I am in countdown mode to when I can ditch the iPhone.  I am tired of dropped calls, poor signals and black box controls. 

My message to Apple is - Set the people and their files free!

More on Apple.  Mitchell sent me a wav file to edit for our next podcast. I clicked the link it opens in my browser and the quicktime plug in that I don't even remember giving permission to install starts playing the wave file.  Go to save the file and it tells me I have to buy Quicktime Pro.  The heck with that. I opened the URL in Windows media play and clicked save file as.  Easy pizy,